The North West Fund for Digital & Creative has made a substantial additional equity investment into leading online ticketing platform Fatsoma to accelerate growth.
Manchester-based Fatsoma operates the UK’s fastest-growing event ticketing platform, which uses social media to sell tickets for event promoters, venue owners and festival organisers and has just launched version 2.0 of the Fatsoma platform, offering massive additional functionality. Fatsoma is used by 8,000 businesses across the UK and has more than 900,000 members, including 50,000 Fatsoma reps who actively sell tickets for venues and promoters through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
In March this year the company secured an equity investment from The North West Fund for Digital & Creative, alongside a personal investment from its new chairman, LateRooms co-founder Chris Allen. The North West Fund for Digital & Creative is part of The North West Fund which is financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the European Investment Bank.
Ben Taylor, co-founder and director, said: “The period in between Fatsoma’s initial investment and where we are today, has been a hugely exciting time for the business. Not only have we seen our efforts in building a better platform for promoters pay off with promoters selling more tickets than ever before, but the benefits have come full circle as our bottom line growth has accelerated beyond our initial expectations.
The investment from the North West Fund has allowed us to act quickly on our vision and stay ahead of the curve with innovation. Whilst Facebook and Twitter have always been brilliant sources of sales for us, we’re finding that our solution is ideal for the emerging number of personal and group chat applications like WhatsApp, Kik and iMessage.”
David Smith, Investment Director, AXM Venture Capital, which manages The North West Fund for Digital & Creative, said: “In the short period since our first investment, Fatsoma has shown a huge increase in revenues, resourced its team up to over 20 staff, and delivered an entirely rebuilt version 2.0 of its flagship platform. We are pleased to be able to support the company by making a second round investment to further accelerate this rate of progress.”